Rolf Harris trial: Entertainer's performance in the witness box likely to be his last

Rolf Harris had feared his past might catch up with him. In the end, the 84-year-old's performance in the witness box during his trial will be his last for quite some time, writes Europe correspondent Barbara Miller.

There was a moment early on in the trial when I caught Rolf Harris's eye as he paced about the huge, glass-enclosed dock where he spent the best part of two months.

He was staring out, perhaps hoping to catch his wife Alwen's eye, perhaps just assessing the scene in disbelief.

How had it come to this?

How had Rolf Harris, in the words of one of his victims, the "great television star", Rolf Harris CBE AO, Rolf Harris painter of the Queen, a man who generations of Brits and Australians knew and loved, found himself here in this miserable, window-less courtroom accused of these despicable crimes?

He was wide-eyed and looked almost lost as he scanned the room. I almost felt a pang of sorrow for him.

Our eyes met briefly. I looked away embarrassed, unable to reconcile my sense of the old Rolf Harris - jovial, quirky, energetic - with the image in front of me and the predicament he found himself in.

Later, Harris would tell the court he had long feared his past would catch up with him, not, he said, in the form of criminal charges, but by way of an exclusive story splashed over the Sunday papers.

He said the brother of the main complainant in the case, a friend of his daughter, had threatened to go to the papers when he confronted Harris after hearing his sister had had a sexual relationship with him.

Harris claimed the relationship was adult and consensual but said worries that the affair would hit the headlines hung over him from that point onwards like a sword of Damocles.

Worst kept secret eventually became public

Ironically, when years later news began to leak out that Harris had been questioned by British police in connection with allegations of sexual assault, the media for a long time kept shtum. It was an exclusive up for grabs and initially there were no takers.

There was no doubt the 82-year-old man from Berkshire that police were issuing statements about was none other than the famous children's entertainer.

In the absence of public confirmation from the inventor of the wobble-board himself or his agent, who had gone to ground, and in the face of threatening letters by his lawyers about the consequences of naming Harris, no-one ran the story, even after well-known and respected blogger Guido Fawkes dared to do what the mainstream media would not.

This was a post-Leveson world. The News Of The World, once the nation's reliable source of gossip and scandal, had shut its doors, its former senior executives bracing themselves for their own criminal trial.

Eventually The Sun newspaper lifted the lid on one of Fleet Street's worst kept secrets and everyone else followed suit.

The old Harris not enough to sway jury

It would be another year before the case came to court in a trial which lasted almost eight weeks and saw the jury deliberate for eight days.

Harris sat quietly through the case in the dock, listening with the aid of a hearing loop, sometimes scribbling notes.